Designer Jeffrey Bilhuber conjured all the quirks, comfort, and charm of classic English style for a British family living on New York's Upper East Side.

In the unlikely event that Jeffrey Bilhuber were to walk away from his career as one of America's leading designers, he could easily become a magician. Sleight of hand seems a natural gift. Clients hardly notice as he lifts their pocket-change dreams and transforms them—presto!—into residences as breathtaking as a flight of doves.

Bilhuber hesitates to reveal the secrets of his craft, in which a mix of traditional periods, styles, colors, and patterns are made to per- form new tricks utterly of this moment. "It's our responsibility to move history forward," he says. "We learn from the past. We just don't want to be obligated to it." Pressed for details, he's liable to divert attention to his more practical skills. "I'm a businessman first," he says. "My office is very productive and detail-driven—not just about the creative process, but also about the business aspects of design. We bring value to the table."

Value that, to the Maitland Hudsons, made for a perfect starting point. The couple—he works in finance; she is an at-home mother to their two daughters—hail from England. "In the U.K.," says Victoria, "people don't use decorators much." Indeed, although the pair had lived in seven different apartments since moving to Manhattan 11 years ago, Victoria had always taken on the task of decorating the spaces as required. But they soon realized they were in a different league upon acquiring the townhouse. "We never would have been able to pull off something like this," says Victoria.

For Bilhuber, their roots suggested a pattern for growth. "English rooms are infused with color and romance," he says. "I wanted to take that foundation and make it very powerful. Very urban."

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The sitting room is a case in point. Lacquered yellow walls animate every beam of light, lending an almost liquid sense of movement to the room. The bay window bears a pattern Bilhuber abstracted from a landscape found on an 18th-century folding screen—done here in gesso finished with gilding, lacquer, and abalone. "I wanted to create the sense of a screen that could be penetrated," says the designer, noting that the middle bay opens to the terrace.

Traditional furnishings are composed to suggest energy and to pro- vide flexibility for a growing family. "Jeffrey creates salon-like spaces where you can almost feel the conversations you'd have," says Toby. "The previous owners had a third of the furniture, but the rooms seemed more cluttered. Now it's all appropriately proportioned."

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Yet Bilhuber also knows that a chair is not just an object to be arranged aesthetically—the job of a seat is to invite sitting. "There's so much comfort in his work," says Victoria. "All the cushions are extra plumped." Referencing the designer's books (he has published three), she notes that every image makes you long to install yourself right there in the scene. The trick works in three dimensions, too— the family's sitting room, for example, is anchored by an irresistible Beaux Arts–style sofa upholstered in shell pink. "It's hard to feel in a bad mood if you sit on that sofa," says Victoria.

Throughout, Bilhuber plays with the transformative properties of surfaces: Screens become walls become doors become portieres. In the dressing room, panels from a Chinese screen double as closet doors, making it pretty enough to serve as a guest room. Sycamore paneling in the library can be closed to shut out all light. "City town- houses tend to be a bit myopic," says Bilhuber. "You look from the front of the house right through to the back. It's important to find a way to contain the viewers as they move from one room to another."

In the master bedroom, flocked wallpaper and a hooked alpaca carpet create enveloping softness. And in the entrance hall, a digital graphic design applied to one wall sings a buoyant prelude to the self-assured rooms to come—and to the people who inhabit them.

"These are enormously confident rooms that reflect the interests of the owners, who are worldly, curious people," says Bilhuber. "They're always asking, 'Where should we go? What's the next adventure?'" For now, that impulse can be sated right here. Says Victoria, "There isn't a day I don't feel tingly with happiness coming home."

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